


Shine Out, Fair Sun

by elviaprose



Category: Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-23
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2019-05-10 10:48:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14735543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elviaprose/pseuds/elviaprose
Summary: Fuchsia wants Steerpike, and so she'll have him.





	Shine Out, Fair Sun

**Author's Note:**

> Many excellent fics in this fandom fuse BBC and book canon. This particular fic, however, is entirely book-based. 
> 
> Thanks to x_los for the beta!

Fuchsia took Steerpike by the hand and led him into the cave as it blazed. She had worked for hours, scorching the end of each candle until it would cleave softly to the stone walls. There were a thousand of them, and she had placed each one herself. They were unevenly melted, some having burned lower as she lit the others, scattered on every ledge and pressed into every cranny. Fuchsia's powers to execute such a project, though always within her, were seldom exercised. She preferred to build only in her mind. But her cold years among the stones of Gormenghast had taught her the rightful scale of such preparations. Though demanded by no ritual, her work resembled the most reverent of ceremonies. She wanted it to. 

She had covered the bottom of the cave with the softest moss of the forest, and with interesting flowers she had plucked. The flowers were dying, but had not yet begun to show the outward signs of it. Their torn stems and still-perfect petals made her hungry for Steerpike to touch her, and as she had piled more and more of them she had nearly wept with her need for him.

“Tomorrow,” Fuchsia had said to Steerpike the day before, “let us not meet here.” They had been talking, in their usual way, in the little room that Steerpike had appointed for most of their meetings. Steerpike had asked her advice. He was going to climb down the outside of the South Tower, into the ruins below, using a rope. He showed her two knotted lengths of cloth. Which knots seemed stronger? “My life is in your hands, My Lady Fuchsia,” he had said, in his even-voiced way, as she had tested the knots. And she had laughed her dry, quiet laugh, and thought oh, I love him--I don’t want to wait. And she had decided she would give herself to him tomorrow. But not here--no, not in this room, which had always felt wrong for love, too neat and bare for it. 

She had told him to meet her at midnight, outside the cave where they had sheltered the day she had slipped in the rain. Now, as she brought him inside, Steerpike stood immobile, unthankful for what she had done. For once, it was not out of his natural coldness. He might perhaps even have been pleased with the setting, finding the meticulous arrangement suited to his tastes, if from deep in his brain there had not come a terror of the fire. He nearly trembled with it. 

Fuchsia observed his fear, but did not know the true cause.

"Steerpike," she said tenderly, "We needn't--"

"No--" he said, mastering himself more and more as he spoke. He could have asked for darkness, but his terror was of that kind where it was almost impossible to act to abate it. "I have waited--" He fought against his blind fear until it merely buzzed behind his eyes, and he could think past it. “I have waited a very long time for just this very thing.” 

"Oh good," she said, and her voice was rich with a quiet yet full-throated pleasure that a bird would have loved to hear, if her mother had taught her how to call and tame them. "I did think so."

She pulled him down to the moss with a young, bright cry of happiness. "Oh, I do like you," she said warmly. "I do like you ever so much, and have for such a while now." She pulled from her bosom a necklace. "When Doctor Prune gave me this ruby, so many years ago now, I swore I would only wear it in my own company, and for a man who would reverence me," Fuchsia said. "You do, don't you, in your way? Though you are not a very reverent sort of person, are you, my dear Steerpike."

"I'm honored, Lady Fuchsia." Steerpike took the ruby in his hand and kissed it. He hardly needed to spare a thought to know that this was the appropriate gesture--the one she was nearly asking for, the one she would like. 

She did like it. Much more than he had expected. He had not anticipated the gasp of pleasure it would draw from her, the way her hand would come to curl over his high, hunched shoulder to pull him on top of her. It was only a small surprise, but his already nearly fear-mad mind seemed to catch, to grind a little at it. He felt his calculations were becoming almost imperceptibly askew.

"Steerpike," she said, her breath uneven, "tell me if I can kiss you--not if it's permitted by the law, for I know it isn't, but only if you'd let me. Just for yourself. If you’d like me to." 

"Yes," he said quietly, and anyone who heard him would have thought him sincere. He did not particularly mean it, though. He expected to feel almost nothing. It was curious, he observed, as she groaned low in her throat and writhed her body against him, how differently it seemed to affect her. Except. Except that he did feel something. He was pressing back, his breath was coming shorter.

“Touch me,” she said. “Let’s not wait, just touch me, I need it.”

He knew just the thing. He slipped his thin fingers up and past the lush dark hair that curled, unseen beneath her clothes. He hardly had to touch her before she reached her first climax; the merest brush of his red, smooth fingertips against her softer skin was enough.

Her high, quick gasps at this keen pleasure lodged hot in his chest. He had not expected that her desire for him would make his slightest touch ecstasy for her. He had not thought what it would feel like, to touch her delicate skin and know that she loved it--not in a general way, but because he did it. He had not thought he would like it.

Prunesquallor had possessed a forgotten row of squat old books that contained drawings of men and men together, and women and men, and women and women. There had been descriptions beneath them as well. Steerpike had found it quite amusing. He had smiled coldly at the clownish athleticism of some of the positions and had filed them away for the appropriate moment, confident that he knew how the thing was done as well as he needed to. 

He had sometimes pleased himself, in the early morning, after waking with the need for it. He had never entertained himself with thoughts of being with another person, at those times. He had disposed of the physical urge while imagining he was polishing his sword stick, enjoying the sly, private joke of it. Or he had thought of the dark pleasure of stealing poison, and let the shudder of it carry him upwards. He had never once thought of her--how she would like it when he touched her, how she would look. His disinterest, he realized, had been not quite a failure of the imagination, for to call it a failure would suggest that he had been moved to attempt the dream. He would consider it, rather, a failure to try to know certain corners of himself. 

"We'll do it again and again tonight until it hurts and I can't bear it anymore. I'll need you and need you and need you, you old thing," she whispered fiercely. He felt his body tighten pleasurably like a fist in reply. She kissed him again, her teeth biting this time into his lips. Oh, it was _good_ , he thought. He liked it. Nearly loved it. If only he had asked her to put the candles out. He still felt drenched in his awareness of their flickering. The moss was thick and wet--but might it not catch? He tamped the thought down as if it were itself the fire he feared.

“Now let me undress you,” she said. But before she could she became distracted and kissed him again feverishly on his colorless lips, whispering, "Oh, your dear, sly mouth.” Then, she added solemnly: "Steerpike, I love you desperately." The sound that came out of him, as though he had been struck a blow, seemed to come without his permission, without him knowing he would make it, or thinking he would.

Her hands were childishly impatient and clumsy with his clothes, and he had to help her. 

“Oh, you are wonderful,” she said, and began to kiss and bite all she could see of him. His chest and arms were prodigiously scarred, though more palely than his neck, face, and hands.

To say she kissed him as though he was beautiful would have been an insult to her--she kissed him in such a way that made it clear that his body, exactly as it was, was all she could want. He had believed he had coaxed her into passion for him despite his appearance--that she would be able to forget, in the right circumstances, his ugliness. 

He had miscalculated, once again. He had underestimated her. Her powerful imagination was not employed in forgetting his defects; rather, his body in every particular moved her to new heights of imagination. She was wild with the desire to look at him, to touch him, to taste him in a thousand ways. 

He had never forgiven himself for his failure the night he had been burned. It had made him colder and more precise than ever, but it had cracked him with hairline fissures, which his present fear of the fire and the sweet, hot breathed-words that Fuchsia spoke split wide. To be loved like this felt, to him, like being at last spared from his rage at himself. He needed it. He had not thought it would matter to him, when he took her, that she was the first person ever to love him, but it did.

“Say it again,” he whispered.

“Say what?”

“That I am wonderful,” he said. And she did. His heart, withered and black, spasmed in his chest.

He should have replied--she would want to hear how he loved her--but he was so used to lying that he did not know how to say anything that was not over-polished and hollow, and he found he did not want to slip back into his old way of speaking, not when he felt so new and so alive. He was willing to risk her displeasure to avoid doing it. But she did not seem to mind it.

When he fell on her in a frenzy, she shouted in triumph, and he echoed her. He slid inside her easily--they both wanted it so much that it could not have been anything but easy--and he had not lost his eel quickness, even in such a state--and he wished he had a knife to plunge instantly into his heart so that he would die perfectly, and he wished also that he would never die and that they could do this forever. 

They couldn’t. Steerpike did not so much as try to prolong it, too relentlessly calculating to make a futile effort even of that. They could never have lingered--not with the need that wracked them, and so the little torturous halts they might have called, the gasping moments of delay they might have added would certainly have been useless. They collapsed together on the moss, clutched in each other’s arms. “Let's stay the night like this,” she said, and her dark eyes were warm with contentment and fondness for him. Her dark skin flushed with it.

They rose to extinguish the candles, which had not burned out of their own accord. Steerpike removed from his pocket a small extendable candle snuffer, snapped it open, and began to muffle the flames, one by one. Meanwhile, Fuchsia, laughing her dry laugh, surprised him again by lifting a bucket of water from the shadows and splashing it across the walls. Rather than feeling irritated, he found he was grinning a little, nearly laughing at himself.

In the darkness, Steerpike lay near Fuchsia, but without touching her, for he did not want her to ask why he was trembling on and on. It was relief at the end of the candlelight and of the terrible pleasure, and longing for the return of both. 

He had, for the first time in his life, tasted from the wellspring of the deepest, most secret joy of his own heart. He did not regret it. In fact, he savored the painful, green-wood feeling of it. But now, he knew, he would need new plans. He would have to be as clever and careful as he could in making them. There was something in him now that could be desecrated, could be hurt and trampled, and he could not allow that to happen. It was a part of himself, and just for that it was worth saving. But beyond that he saw in it the key to whole new worlds of pleasure. His red eyes stared into the darkness with vicious resolve. He must be savage and ruthless in preserving this tenderness he had found in himself, this pleasant weakness. He must protect it as though it were his dearest, first-born child. And so, he vowed, Fuchsia must always adore him. Always, whatever it took.

**Author's Note:**

> P.S. I am posting this fic on World Goth Day. And I'm proud of that.


End file.
